”Ever wonder why Ballard, Green Lake and other north Seattle neighborhoods are so white, and the Central District and the Rainier Valley are so diverse? Blame housing prices for a start; whiter neighborhoods tend to be more expensive, and white people tend to have more money than African Americans, Hispanics and some Asian groups.

”But also blame history.

”Racist housing covenants once restricted where people of color could live in Seattle, largely in the northend. Ballard didn’t want “Ethiopians” (blacks), Magnolia had a problem with “Malays” (Filipinos), and Broadmoor shut out “Hebrews” (Jews).”

So, the dark side here isn’t just that there was pretty strong racism in our past. Hell, the nation has a racist past. No, for us the knee-jerk response to even trying to talk about race is kinda dark. To move forward, we need to come to terms with the forces that have shaped the world were in. To close our eyes to it is to embrace darkness … ahem. And so say all of us.

Apparently we’re going back for more abuse and self-loathing over our addiction to failing at building a real monorail. That’s dark, man.

The Seattle Times summarized last week: “Magnolia activist Elizabeth Campbell and her allies collected more than the 4,582 signatures required to put the issue on the ballot, after two years of off-and-on signature gathering. This will be the city’s fifth monorail-related vote.”

Even if it is a good idea, the modern monorail idea is like the living dead … you just can’t kill it because it already dead! What can you do to stop it? Nothing. You just have to get used to the smell and and that empty moaning sound.

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On the lighter side of the dark side of history, my sisters (all in their 50s and 60s now) want their high-waisted, no-leg jean shorts back! I mean wasn’t one time in history enough for this fashion? Well, okay … go ahead and be kids. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

On the lighter side of the dark side of history, my sisters (all in their 50s and 60s now) want their high-waisted, no-leg jean shorts back! I mean wasn’t one time in history enough for this fashion? Well,

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Let’s start again with the good dark side:

The Dead Baby Downhill is one of those playfully dark subculture events that give the city some wanted depth and character. The downhill “race” is organized annually by the Dead Baby Bike Club. It ends, or has in previous years, in Georgetown, and is followed by a party.

Photo - The more competitive bike messengers were undaunted by a slow freight train that split the race course. Others were content to wait for the train to pass.

Playfully dark fascination with burlesque – so much so that not even Christmas is immune from the spread of it. In fact, the Land of the Sweets “The Burlesque Nutcracker” sells out and one mag called it “The best thing about Christmas in Seattle.”

Playfully dark fascination with burlesque – so much so that not even Christmas is immune from the spread of it. In fact, the Land of the Sweets “The Burlesque Nutcracker” sells out and one mag called it

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Sometimes, the voters in this town!

Well, seems like they got all negative and missed a great opportunity here. Not exactly a dark side, just an indication of how hard it is to run this town.

It’s well known that the city fathers destroyed a huge hill to flatten the city. But those water-gun happy city fathers also wanted to build a new civic center and government seat at the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Blanchard Street as part of a rebuilding effort that also would have seen Mercer Island bought by the city of Seattle and turned into a public park. Voters said no, and the regrade festered for most of the 20th century.

Above is the city of Seattle’s sketch of the civic center that never was.

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Life isn’t all fun and games and it's not truly a dark side until someone gets a eye put out … or an extra arm growing out of a back.
So on with the tougher side of the dark side.

Life isn’t all fun and games and it's not truly a dark side until someone gets a eye put out … or an extra arm growing out of a back.
So on with the tougher side of the dark side.

Photo: Ivan Bliznetsov, Getty Images

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Heavy chemical and metal contamination of our parks and waterways:

Elevated radiation levels at Magnuson Park, which is located on land originally used as a naval station; a recent study said people living in the Duwamish (river) Valley are exposed to more pollution and live shorter lives than residents in other parts of the Seattle area …

But the good are winning the battle to erase the dark side of and clean up Lake Washington – its recent history was one of treated sewage and phosphates causing plumes of bad algae … so much that in 1963, the August Post-Intelligencer referred to the lake as "Lake Stinko."

Gay bashing and, at least, perceived police nonchalance in the 1990s on Capitol Hill got so bad that a couple of groups sprang up to patrol the neighborhood. First it was the Queen Nation chapter that then spawned the Q Patrols in their red/pink berets.

The Stranger explained in a later story that the community didn’t feel that the police were taking crimes against gay people seriously enough and that’s why the patrols started:

“Groups like Q-Patrol were modeled on the Guardian Angels and flourished in a handful of cities with large gay populations in the late '80s and early '90s. It was a time when queers were increasingly visible but police departments were still hopelessly homophobic. The feeling among queers at the time went something this: We have to police 'our' streets and attempt to prevent bashings before they happen, because the police don't take crimes against us seriously. Victims of gay bashings a decade or two ago usually didn't bother to call the police.”

Gay bashing and, at least, perceived police nonchalance in the 1990s on Capitol Hill got so bad that a couple of groups sprang up to patrol the neighborhood. First it was the Queen Nation chapter that then

Seattle's Human Services Department defines a homeless youth as someone between the ages of 12 and 24 without a safe, stable place to sleep who is not part of a family. Estimates place the number of homeless youths in the city at about 1,000, with about twice that number countywide.

The city estimates that 35 percent were residents of Seattle before becoming homeless and that 31 percent come from outside King County. Less than 10 percent come from out of state, and the remainder are from cities within the county but outside Seattle.

Like every place in America (or the world), bigotry in Seattle has a present and also a deep past that can still raise eyebrows ...

Let’s set the stage with a visit to the deep past, when the settlers here didn’t yet have a full upper hand. A group of Native Americans didn’t like what they were seeing from their new neighbors and attacked them: The 1856 Battle of Seattle.

The battle began on Jan. 26, not long after the settlement, sitting about where current-day Pioneer Square is, named itself after Chief Seattle (Sealth), a leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples of central Puget Sound. The attackers didn’t stand much of a chance, because the white Seattleites were backed by artillery fire and supported by Marines from the United States Navy sloop-of-war Decatur, anchored in Elliott Bay. The settlers suffered only two deaths, and the attackers “would admit” later to 28 dead and 80 wounded.

Fearing another attack, the white residents and military built an earthen fence around most of the settlement.

Wikimedia Commons description of the photo: A map of Seattle, drawn at the time of the Battle of Seattle, part of the Puget Sound War. Map shows the sloop USS Decatur and the bark Brontes in Elliott Bay, Henry Yesler's mill, wharf, and a pile of sawdust, indigenous settlements in and around town (depicted with tipi-like symbols). The camp in town is labeled "Tecumseh's Camp", the one in the woods just north of Yesler's Mill is labeled "Curley's Camp." On the slopes above the town there is text saying "Hills and Woods thronged with Indians". A sand spit separates a tide marsh from the tide flats of the bay. The location is roughly where Seattle's Pioneer Square is today. The main north-south street is today's First Avenue, the main west-east street shown is today's Jackson Street. Today's Yesler Way would terminate at the wharf. The marsh and tide

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About 30 years later, Seattleites didn’t have to worry much about Native Americans, but they were pretty ticked off about the Chinese. In 1856, anti-Chinese sentiment was exacerbated by a tightening labor market. That tension burst out into a three-day riot in February.

Wikipedia: “The dispute arose when a mob affiliated with a local Knights of Labor chapter formed small committees to carry out a forcible expulsion of all Chinese from the city. Violence erupted between the Knights of Labor rioters and federal troops ordered in by President Grover Cleveland. The incident resulted in the removal of over 200 Chinese from Seattle and left 2 militia men and 3 rioters seriously injured.”

Photo: Artist's conception of the 1886 anti-Chinese riot in Seattle. The three panels are entitled, respectively, "Packing Up", "On the Wharf" and "The Collision".
Originally from West Shore Magazine, March 1886. Photo by Joe Mabel of an object at Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), Seattle, Washington.

About 30 years later, Seattleites didn’t have to worry much about Native Americans, but they were pretty ticked off about the Chinese. In 1856, anti-Chinese sentiment was exacerbated by a tightening labor

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Wow. I mean … what can you say?

Sure it was 1930, but it wasn’t just a crazy, isolated incident.

Note the headline on the next slide. It doesn’t say, you know, “Holy %@#! – what in the hell just opened in Lake City?” Instead, just, “Hey, a wacky new place to get chicken fingers” …

Historylink explains: The Coon Chicken Inn was a fried-chicken restaurant chain located on the Old Bothell Highway on the outskirts of the Seattle city limits, in what is today the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle. The Seattle branch -- part of a larger chain founded by Maxon Lester Graham (1897-1977) in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1925 -- opened its doors in August 1930. The restaurant was famous for its ubiquitous logo of a "Coon," or a caricatured African American male. Despite protests from the African American community, the Seattle branch remained open until late 1949.

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We all know about the internment of Japanese Americans, but it’s still important to note that Seattle was one of the nation’s epicenters for this wartime bigotry.

The gist of it from Historylink:

On March 30, 1942, Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound became the first group in the nation to be evacuated. A few weeks later in Seattle, on Tuesday, April 21, "evacuation" announcements were posted on telephone poles and bulletin boards. The community was to leave the city in three groups the following Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. A total of 12,892 persons of Japanese ancestry from Washington state were incarcerated.

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Seattle had “Sundown Zones” as late as the mid-1960s, which made it illegal for black people to be north of the Ship Canal or in Magnolia, Queen Anne or West Seattle after dark.
As far as the racist covenants go, they’re worse than just Blue Ridge.

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In 1984, you didn’t have to go to northern Idaho to witness a fiery shootout with white supremacists.

The founder of the violent white-supremacist group The Order was killed in a house fire near Smuggler’s Cove on Whidbey Island after a 35-hour stand off with the FBI. Robert J. Matthews had been the object of an intense manhunt since November of that year when he escaped from the FBI in Portland after wounding an agent in the leg. The Order's legacy of terror lasted until April 15, 1985, when 23 members of the gang were indicted by a federal grand jury in Seattle and arrested by the FBI, according to Historylink.

In the mid-1800s, the term Skid Road was commonly applied to logging camps throughout the region. The area around Yesler's Mill may have acquired this nickname by such association. The phrase was not popularized until the early 20th century, when crusading local prohibitionist Rev. Mark Matthews (1867-1940) invoked Skid Road to condemn the saloons and brothels clustered in an all-but-official vice district south of Yesler Way. In later usage, Skid Road morphed into "Skid Row" to denote any derelict urban neighborhood -- and Pioneer Square definitely qualified between the Great Depression and its restoration in the 1970s.
Wikimedia Commons Photos: The original "Skid Road" (Mill Street, now Yesler Way) in Seattle. The top image: View looking west to Yesler's Mill at the end of the street (see smokestack) and nearby cookhouse. The tall pole in the road on the right is where the Pioneer Square pergola stands today. The bottom image: Yesler's Mill, stores, and taverns on Skid Road.

OK, on to the just plan seedy part …
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Speaking of prostitution:
From our archives: Seattle’s Frank Colacurcio Sr., who led a local strip-club empire and was painted by law enforcement as the Pacific Northwest's own organized crime figure, died in 2010.

Colacurcio was 93 and had just been under indictment on racketeering charges stemming from massive law enforcement investigation into prostitution inside his well-known clubs, including Rick's on Lake City Way. A week before, Colacurcio Sr.'s son pleaded guilty to charges related to a years-long prostitution and racketeering probe.

Photo: Frank Colacurcio Sr., right, and his associate John Gilbert Conte enter the U.S. Courthouse in Seattle in July 2009.

Speaking of prostitution: From our archives: Seattle’s Frank Colacurcio Sr., who led a local strip-club empire and was painted by law enforcement as the Pacific Northwest's own organized crime figure, died

And of course we had the WTO riots, when the world came to talk money and we gave them tear gas, flash bombs, heavy-handed arrests, lawsuits and a police chief who later regretted it all so much that he dropped out to become a writer.

And of course we had the WTO riots, when the world came to talk money and we gave them tear gas, flash bombs, heavy-handed arrests, lawsuits and a police chief who later regretted it all so much that he dropped

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According to the Washington State Department of Transportation, a suicide-prevention fence had to be put up on the Aurora Bridge because it was the second-most-popular bridge for suicides in the nation, behind the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Photo: The fence is eight feet, nine inches tall and runs along both outer edges of the bridge for the entire length of the bridge.

According to the Washington State Department of Transportation, a suicide-prevention fence had to be put up on the Aurora Bridge because it was the second-most-popular bridge for suicides in the nation, behind

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Then there’s the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which the city’s mayor attempted to break up with the help of the army and deputized University of Washington students.

The Seattle General Strike lasted five-days and involved more than 65,000 workers. Seattle Mayor Hanson had federal troops available and stationed 950 sailors and marines across the city by Feb. 7. He added 600 men to the police force and hired 2,400 special deputies -- students from the University of Washington, for the most part.

Strikers called his bluff. But, in the end, workers trickled back to work until finally the General Strike Committee voted to end the general strike on Feb. 11.

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Vigilante mobs? We had 'em:

The October 1881 murder of Seattle Police Chief David Sires sparked a vigilante mob, which stormed the arraignment of two other accused killers – they were thought to have killed a businessman – and lynched them in front of a crowd of 2,000. The mob then returned to the jail and seized Sires' killer – Benjamin Payne -- whom they also lynched. The irony is that the King County sheriff died of a heart attack while trying to break up the mob.

Note: Many authoritative histories of Seattle erroneously ascribe the Great Fire's start to James McGough's paint shop on the floor above Clairmont's workshop at First Avenue and Madison Street, based on initial newspaper reports. McGough protested his innocence, and the Post-Intelligencer published a correction and a detailed interview with John Back on June 21, 1889. Despite this, historians and journalists repeated the error for nearly a century until historian James Warren noticed the correction and, in his 1989 monograph The Day Seattle Burned, shifted the point of origin to Clairmont's shop. This essay was expanded on June 20, 2006.

Image from Wikimedia Commons: The start of the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889, looking south on First Avenue near Madison Street.

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Heroin and Seattle … darkness injected right into the soul. The big names go down – Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley - because of it (at least it was a factor) and the world turns to Seattle and thinks: Heroin.

“In the days after Kurt Cobain's violent suicide, the nation again gaped at Seattle's grunge music scene. The lead singer of Nirvana was on heroin when he shot himself in the head, renewing speculation that Seattle is a hotbed of heroin abuse, particularly among grunge musicians and fans.” That’s what the Seattle Times wrote in 1994.
And after Cobain's body was found on April 8, his widow, singer Courtney Love, characterized Seattle as a drug mecca, the Times continued, where heroin was easier to get than in San Francisco or Los Angeles.
And it didn’t end with them or the youth of grunge.

“Nationally, Seattle is fairly high in heroin use,” said Caleb Banta-Green, a research scientist for the ADAI in a press release. “Even higher in use are prescription-type opiates.”

The major demographic change, according to his study, in the last decade is with young users. Admissions for heroin among those 18 to 29 years old has increased by 74 percent.

Photo caption: The body of Kurt Cobain is taken from his home on April 8, 1994. He had not been seen since April 3. Photo: Mike Urban/Copyright MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, 2000.107_19940408_0048.

We’re a popular port for human trafficking.
The P-I reported in 2006 that 22 people were being held after they apparently arrived in a 40-foot cargo container at the Port of Seattle aboard a ship from China.

It was the first time a human-smuggling attempt using a cargo container had been detected in Seattle since a flurry of similar incidents along the U.S. and Canadian West Coasts in 2000 and 2001.

Federal experts believe Seattle's many points of entry make the city one of the nation's top human-trafficking hot spots.

Photo - The interior of the cargo container that carried the immigrants.

We’re a popular port for human trafficking.
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We’re politically liberal, but we have homeless encampments. That’s not normal.

Last year The Associated Press put it:
Residents of a homeless camp in Seattle called Nickelsville have a Sept. 1 eviction deadline. A majority of Seattle City Council members asked the mayor to close the camp and offer shelter, housing and other services to the residents.

Former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn agreed and said the city would enforce the law against encampments. About 100 people live in tents and makeshift dwellings at the camp named for former Mayor Greg Nickels.

But many in the camps didn’t want to leave … one reason, and not a small one, is that they have pets and charity housing is a tough bet for pets.

Photo - The west end of the Nickelsville tent community in West Seattle. More than 130 people call this place home, including several families and pregnant women. There is no electricity, showers or running water.